Friday, 27 June 2014

INEVITABLE DOG BITING PUN

Four years ago Bedlington Terriers got a bit of attention when a US billionaire, fittingly called Bob Rich, sponsored the club. Mr Rich paid for the pitch to be relayed and bought the Terriers a huge electric scoreboard. Unfortunately when the club groundsmen plugged it in it fused the floodlights.

Back in 1998 Bedlington had a good run in the FA Cup. No electrical troubles resulted.

When asked for directions to
Bedlington Terriers' football ground, the man in the chip shop points eastward
to a patch of pale, glimmering blue that breaks the darkness above the roofs of
distant houses. "See them bright lights?" he asks. "Well, that's
it."

Since the Terriers trounced the
Second Division's Colchester United 4-1 in the first round of the FA Cup last
month, the glow the Arnott Insurance Northern League club has been casting over
the small Northumberland town has been as much metaphorical as literal.

There was plenty of evidence of
why that might be so at Doctor Pit Welfare Park on Wednesday night. To keep the
players in the pink for today's away tie at Scunthorpe, a league fixture with
South Shields had been postponed and a news-media event arranged instead.

The original FA Cup was on
display, courtesy of the sponsors AXA, committee men delivered china mugs of
tea to assembled hacks and photographers and three separate camera crews filmed
the team jogging in front of the pitch-side advertising hoarding, unexpected
national exposure for H Ternent, Family Butcher.

In the clubhouse a bespectacled
gent was trying to interest a young female fan in a Bedlington baseball cap:
"Keep your head warm. £4.50."

"It'll spoil my hair."

"Not this 'un, man. It's
adjustable."

The Christmas decorations were up
beside the pennants of visiting teams and the framed signed shirts from Spurs
and Forest and the tape deck was rolling out Hark, The Herald Angels Sing.

Things did not look quite so
festive when the current manager Keith Perry arrived at Doctor Pit Welfare Park
five years ago, and not just because it was March. "We were bottom of the
Second Division of the Northern League, struggling to put together a committee
or a side or to drum up support, on the verge of going under," he recalls,
still flushed from a round of television interviews.

The Bedlington-born Perry was
brought in by Billy Ward, a legendary local figure, who had been involved at
Welfare Park and its predecessor at West Sleekburn "A" Pit for close
to half a century, as player, manager, director and chairman. During that time
the club's suffix changed frequently (from Mechanics to Terriers via Colliery
Welfare, United, Colliery and Town) but their fortunes rarely altered. A
handful of Northern Combination and Alliance titles and league cups excepted,
Bedlington were strugglers.

In 1993, however, the threatened
disappearance of the town's football team shook local people from their apathy.
Relegation and oblivion were avoided. That summer the newly appointed committee
set about rebuilding the club, literally. Keith Perry, who runs a building
company (his brother, Dave, the chairman, is in demolition), dug the holes for
the floodlight pylons himself.

In the following year, beneath
their new lights, Terriers took the Second Division title at a trot. Last
season they repeated the feat in the First, finishing 12 points clear of their
nearest rivals and completing a double by defeating the neighbouring non-league
giants Blyth Spartans in the Northumberland Senior Cup final at St James' Park.
Nowadays they are regularly watched by crowds nudging 300, a considerable
figure in a league in which the two playing staffs can often outnumber the
fans.

Colchester's visit attracted a
club record gate of 1,600, even the most wildly optimistic (or pessimistic if
they had travelled from Essex) of whom could not have expected to see the home
side triumph so comprehensively. That they did was down to a couple of goals by
John Milner, Terriers' all-time top scorer, a masterly display at right-back by
John Sokoluk, a Scot with a Ukrainian father and experience with East Fife and
Berwick Rangers, and the visitor's undisciplined collapse when things did not
go their way.

It may not be so easy today. As
well as home advantage the element of surprise is missing. Not only did
Bedlington's hammering of Colchester serve warning to future opponents,
Scunthorpe's manager Brian Laws also has an impeccable source of local
information. His brother John lives 100 yards down the road from Welfare Park
and has watched Terriers' last five matches.

Despite all this, Perry is
unfazed by the trip south. "The gulf between non-league and league used to
be an ocean, now it's a pond," he says. "When I look at Scunthorpe's
record and see they've conceded 18 times at home I have to think we've a chance
of scoring."

His notion is supported by fact.
Last season the Northumbrians notched 120 goals in 38 Northern League outings.
It is 42 games in all competitions since they last failed to find the net.
"We shan't be playing for a draw," Perry says, "but I tell you
what, I'd love to get them back up here."

If the Terriers do earn
themselves a second chance, do not rely on the floodlights for navigation to
the match. The whole of Bedlington will be shining.

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(Thanks to Kevin Donnelly for the photo)

About the Blogger

Harry Pearson is the author of The Far Corner and nine other works of non-fiction, including Slipless in Settle - winner of the 2011 MCC/Cricket Society Prize. From 1997 through to 2012 he wrote over 700 columns for the Guardian sports section. He has worked for When Saturday Comes since 1988.

About This Blog

When The Far Corner came out a well known football writer whose work I like and respect told me he been unable to finish it. Too much non-League. Too many howls of outrage in the lumpy rain of steeltown winters. Not enough rapture. ‘I’m only interested in the great stars, the great occasions,’ he said, ‘To me football is like opera.’

I don’t care much for opera. And so I have carried on much as I did before: writing about unsung people in rough places where the PA plays 'Sex on the Beach' in the coal-scented February fog and men with ill-advised hair bellow, 'Christ on a bike, this is the drizzling shits.'I could justify this with grandiosity. I could say Dickens and Balzac, Orwell and Zola were more interested in the lower divisions of society than its elite. I could tell you that the sportswriters I most admire are almost all Americans whose primary subject is boxing. AJ Liebling, WC Heinz, Thomas Hauser, Phil Berger and the rest inhabit a world where hucksters, gangsters, the desperate, the doomed and the mad hang out in stinking gyms and amidst the rattle of slot machines, and trainers such as Roger Mayweather say things like, "You don't need no strategy to fight Arturo Gatti. Close your eyes, throw your hands and you'll hit him in the fucking face."

But that is to be wise after the event. Norman Mailer said every writer writes what he can. It is not a choice. We play the cards we're dealt.

A few years ago I stood in a social club kitchen near Ashington listening to an old bloke named Bill talk about a time in the early 1950s when, on a windswept field at East Hirst, beneath anthracite sky, he’d watched a skinny blond teenager ‘float over that mud like a little angel’, glowing at the memory of Bobby Charlton.

Opera is pantomime for histrionic show offs, but this? This is true romance.

The First 30 Years features some new writing and lots of older pieces going back to the late-1980s. This work first appeared in When Saturday Comes, The Guardian, various other newspapers, fanzines and a number of those glossy men's lifestyle magazines that have women in bras on the cover. It is my intention over the next year or so to collect it all here, if for no other reason than to prove to my family that I did do some work every once in a while.

In keeping with the original rhythms of the game I'll post a new piece every Saturday (kick-off times may vary)

The best images here have been provided by a trio of the great photographers I've been lucky enough to work with over the years. I'm very grateful to Tim Hetherington, Colin McPherson, and Peter Robinson for letting me use their work - all of which is copyright of those individuals and cannot be reproduced without their permission.